Child Labor Isn't As Great An Issue As You Might Suppose For Republicans To Bash Biden With
At the state level, the GOP has for years been pressing to allow children to work longer hours in more dangerous settings.
Bleecker Street sweatshop, 1908 (Lewis Hine)
Jacob Riis, call your office. Child labor is making a comeback.
My latest, in the New Republic, follows up an important New York Times investigation published last weekend. The Times reported that two-thirds of all migrant children supposedly being supervised by the Health and Human Services department end up working full-time, which of course violates the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Republican House members can be expected to scream and yell about this latest evidence that our borders are out of control. But it’s taking them a little time to get started. Perhaps that’s because the issue of child labor is an awkward one for Republicans. At the state level, Republican politicians have for years been pressing to weaken statutes that limit the hours when, and settings where, child labor may occur. Presidential hopeful Chris Sununu signed one such Dickensian child labor deregulation bill last summer. Republicans are much more fer child labor than agin it.
You can read my piece here.
There is no way to make another New Republic piece I posted yesterday, about how to fix Social Security and Medicare, sound exciting. So I won’t even try. But it’s an important topic about which very few people furnish honest numbers. Republicans who complain Democrats aren’t willing to face facts on government spending are themselves unable to get specific about how to put Social Security and Medicare on firm financial footing. That’s because what they really want to do is cut benefits, and there’s no way in hell that the elderly, a constituency on which the GOP has come to rely, will stand for that. Democrats are better situated to address the funding shortfall because Democrats like progressive taxes and the obvious solution is to make the FICA tax more progressive. My piece furnishes data on both the electoral side and the policy-wonk side of this issue. More here.